Professor Takayuki Kosaka has some pretty interesting ideas about how to get kids to eat vegetables: Sit them down in front of a video game and give them cookies.
The game is called Food Practice Shooter, and players have to shoot their way through giant vegetable who have taken over a city. If you kill a veggie, you lose ammunition. To get it back you — the real you, not the character in the video game — have to eat vegetable-flavored biscuit cookies (which are supposedly healthy, somehow). The biscuits are on a scale, so the game knows when you’ve taken one out of the cup, and your headphones have sensors that know if you’re chewing. So, NO CHEATING. Then, there’s a camera mounted on the gun, and you look into it and smile. That’s how the power-up works.
“This, Kosaka says, trains the kids to eat the vegetables and enjoy the taste, by associating it with the positive feelings of smiling,” Wired writes.
Or, possibly, with guns and the act of killing giant vegetables? It seems like there are some mixed messages here, but, hey, if it works, we won’t complain.
